Hands-On With Imp, the Wi-Fi Card That Wants to Power Your ‘Internet of Things’

The Imps get down to business the moment you wake up: Your blinds automatically open, and your coffee maker starts brewing your favorite dark roast.

But the mischief doesn’t end there. Throughout the day, the Imps assume control over other household technology. Your garage door sends you a text message confirming that it’s closed. Your fridge sends you a shopping list reminding you to buy milk. Your ambient room lighting changes color at dusk for a more moody vibe.

And when 9 p.m. rolls around, your dishwasher turns on to take advantage of cheaper utility rates.

This is the connected world envisioned by the team at Electric Imp, a six-employee startup that’s created the Imp card, a small wafer of plastic that houses a Cortex-M3 processor and Wi-Fi antenna, and taps into an accompanying cloud service. Imp cards can conceivably be installed in any electronic device, making it possible to connect conventional appliances to the internet.

The product’s name is derived from Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novel series Discworld, where imps are small, demonical creatures that power the world’s gadgets. But Imp also harkens back to the early days of the ARPANET, where a mainframe couldn’t access the network directly, so it would use an Interface Message Processor — or IMP — to connect online.

“This is pretty much the same job we do for devices,” Hugo Fiennes, the founder and CEO of Electric Imp, told Wired. “We just made it really, really flexible, and easy for vendors and customers to use. There are a lot of things that can be made better by making sure they’re connected. A lot of times it’s not a big grand plan of anything.”

No grand plan? Actually, everything about Electric Imp’s product reeks of a platform for controlling the “Internet of Things,” that theoretical construct in which all of the world’s personal devices and information systems seamlessly work together.

While Electric Imp may not have a grand plan for exactly how it will fuel our connected futures, its Imp cards could still have grand impacts in our day-to-day interactions with appliances and consumer electronics. I spent a recent morning at Electric Imp’s office in Los Altos, California, to watch demos of Imp’s capabilities and see how it works.

And I was more than impressed. The connected future is here, and it’s incredibly simple and easy.

A simple Electric Imp board with an Imp card slot. It could be installed in any electronic device. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired

Wi-Fi connected devices aren’t exactly new. We’ve already seen the Withings and FitBit Aria scales, both of which send your weight data to the internet for graphing and tracking. And home automation, of course, is a growth sector. Microsoft Research recently announced its HomeOS, Samsung showed off its Home Energy Management System at CES 2012, and Google debuted Android@Home at last year’s I/O conference.

But what makes Electric Imp unique — and perhaps a better solution than others — is that it can work with any electronic device. You don’t need to lock into a relatively closed system from a single standards alliance (for example, the Z-Wave home automation protocol).

The whole Imp service is based in the cloud, so there’s no need for a central controller or networking protocol. It’s incredibly easy to set up. And it’s inexpensive — Electric Imp has targeted its Imp boards (the hardware into which the Imp cards are slotted) to cost manufacturers less than a dollar.

It’s critical to note that Electric Imp isn’t making or selling actual consumer electronics. Rather, its technology just provides gadgets with a simple way to connect to Wi-Fi, and offers a platform for vendors and consumers to configure how they want their product to work. To this end, Electric Imp could save would-be gadget manufacturers from expensive and time-consuming development paths.

“With all of the current Wi-Fi objects, like the Withings scale, the company has to figure out its Wi-Fi configuration and the technology itself. They’ve reinvented a whole connection wheel just to send a tiny amount of information up,” Fiennes said. “But you could put a slot in, and Electric Imp will do all the hard work. You can send the reading, and it’s all done. Imp provides the service.”

Each Imp card comes with Wi-Fi radio supporting 802.11b/g/n and has nine pins, two for power and one that communicates with an ID chip that will reside in every Imp-capable device. The other six pins are available for developers and manufacturers to configure on a case-by-case basis, according to their product needs.

For example, a device manufacturer could write code so that one pin is used to send tweets, while another collects the latest headlines from Google News. All the software running this show is stored in Electric Imp’s cloud service, and the Imp card will know which software to pull down from the ether based on the ID chip in the device’s Imp circuit board.

For this very reason, Imp cards are completely device-independent. You can insert one in your dishwasher, and then later move it to your stereo receiver if you think it will provide more utility there.

Currently, the software side of Imp is still in developer mode. The web-based Planner app, where users set up how they want their Imps to work, features drag-and-drop boxes with connecting lines. It’s a prototype, and the company is working on creating a more simple, consumer-facing user interface. According to Kevin Fox, Electric Imp’s Director of User Experience, most of the consumer configuration will take place on a smartphone app, which will be available for iOS and Android devices.

Hugo Fiennes using Electric Imp

So what does it all look like in action? Fiennes showed us several hardware applications, ranging from the universally useful to the very specific (and often strange).

As you’d expect, something simple like a light switch could come with an Electric Imp slot. You just push your Imp card into the slot, and set up your Wi-Fi with Electric Imp’s Blinkup technology. It’s an incredibly slick set-up process, and will impress anyone who’s struggled with some of the more convoluted Wi-Fi schemes of various connected devices. From a smartphone app, you just select your Wi-Fi network and type in your password — your phone’s screen will start flashing rapidly. Hold the screen up to a sensor along the edge of the Imp card, and you’re done.

The switch shows up on Electric Imp’s web interface (or the future mobile app), and from here you configure it to talk with other Imp-connected devices. For example, you could connect an Imp-enabled floor lamp to an Imp-enabled toggle switch on the other side of the house. When you flip the switch, the lamp turns on — and you never needed to rip out your walls to install internal wiring that would do the exact same thing.

That’s an extremely basic use case. (The light switch Fiennes showed us required less than 20 lines of code to work.) But what’s cool is that it doesn’t matter where the switch and the lamp are located. You could have a switch in your home connected to a lamp across the world, and it would still work because the Imp card sends a signal over Wi-Fi to the company’s cloud service, and then back down to the other Imp it’s connected to.

Fiennes also showed off an Imp-connected water stick, which could send you a text when a plant is running low on water. Better yet, you could connect the water stick to some lights, and have the lights dim (or turn off) once the water is low — a useful application for a Christmas tree.

You could even have an Imp-connected electric mouse trap that lets you know when a mouse has been caught. And, of course, you could have appliances, like washers and dryers, that track your usage, or have Imp-connected motion sensors that alert you when someone walks into a room. The possibilities are unlimited.

An electric mouse trap with an Imp card slot (the card is not all the way pushed in). Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired

The Electric Imp office already has a number of connected devices lying around: a receipt printer that prints every tweet that mentions the words “Electric Imp.” An RGB LED light matrix that displays the profile picture of the latest Twitter user to tweet “Electric Imp.” There’s also a large ticker that displays the number of total Imp cards in use.

The company’s team members have also engineered some very individual applications for the Imp cards at home. Fox has an Imp-connected thermometer that measures the temperature of one room in his house, where he hosts foster kittens. He’s configured the device to send him texts when the temperature reaches a certain level, so he knows when he needs to adjust the room so the kittens remain comfortable.

Lolo Fong, the company’s project manager, uses her Imp to measure the water level in her rabbit’s water bottle. When the water gets low, she receives an alert to add more. But this could even be taken a step further: How about collecting data on how quickly the rabbit drinks its water, or what times of day the rabbit does and doesn’t drink?

“People actually have very individual things that they want, and they are unlikely to be fulfilled by any of the solutions out there as the moment,” Fiennes said. “The platform makes it easy for people to scratch the connective itch.”

To this end, Fiennes and company are excited to see what comes from makers, hackers and the DIY crowd. (Electric Imp made its debut at the San Francisco Maker Faire in May.) “We’re looking forward to weird stuff from hobbyists, which might turn out to be the next big thing. There are products that haven’t existed before,” Fiennes said. “You could have a hamster wheel that connects with Nike+.”

Electric Imp has already received a lot of attention from developers and makers, but the key to the company’s overall success will depend a lot on manufacturer pick-up, and this in turn depends on the platform’s software experience.

“Electric Imp will have to look beyond the devices to the customer experience,” James McQuivey, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research, told Wired. “Surely, a lamp maker can’t afford to invest in becoming a world-class software developer, not solely to make lamps easier to control and monitor. But a company that enables a whole range of devices — and does so with an elegant, intuitive experience — is a company that has a shot at making the Internet of things happen.”

Fiennes assured us that Electric Imp has already partnered with several manufacturers in a range of categories, though he wouldn’t mention any major names. He did, however, share that Elemental, a small Emeryville, California-based startup, has signed up to add Imp slots in its LED lights. And you can expect to start seeing an initial batch of simple devices with built-in Imp slots available by the end of this year.

But before that happens, Imp cards and developer kits are scheduled to go on sale at the end of June. Cards will cost $25 each, and development kits will range in price depending on the model. The development kits are outfitted with three different Imp board iterations: The “April” board will cost $7 and feature a socket, ID chip, and a power supply. The “Hannah” board comes with a bunch of sensors (temperature, accelerometer, RBG LED, and more) and will cost $25. And the “Duino” board that’s compatible with Arduino Uno will cost $20.

Because most of the Imp’s magic happens on the software side, the cloud service won’t be totally free to users. As soon as devices hit the market and consumers start purchasing Imp cards and Imp-compatible devices, Electric Imp will start imposing a small fee for usage. Fiennes said that nothing is finalized yet, but it might cost around $10 a quarter to monitor and control up to 20 Imp cards. And for simple uses, like Imp-connected light switches and plugs, the service will likely be free.

After watching the technology in action, it’s easy to imagine how people could incorporate Imp-connected devices not only in their homes, but anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection. Everything from cars to toys could connect via Imps, freeing huge amounts of data, and making fascinating connections via the Internet of things.

“The mission is to connect things,” Fiennes said. “The whole team, everyone believes in what we’re doing — the same stuff has frustrated them. We’re making something that all of us would want to use.”

Considering that Electric Imp has already raised the $7.9 million in venture funding, it would appear that people outside the company are confident in the team members’ vision of a connected future.